


Space

by nightshade (sunburst)



Series: moon song [2]
Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Confessions, Graduation, M/M, Roommates, [wonwoo voice] well i'm not the moon i'm not even a star, the slings and arrows of trying to be a writer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-21 13:54:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30022767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunburst/pseuds/nightshade
Summary: Wonwoo tries to write a poem about Soonyoung.
Relationships: Jeon Wonwoo/Kwon Soonyoung | Hoshi
Series: moon song [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2207592
Comments: 11
Kudos: 54





	Space

**Author's Note:**

> My quick-summoned first love— how everything was enough because I knew so little but felt cramped with certainty— is, I’m afraid, just like writing.
> 
> \- Durga Chew-Bose, Heart Museum

The balcony is a place of honesty. Tomorrow when Wonwoo needs to take a breath he’ll be looking up at the same old moon but he’ll be standing in a different place and he’ll probably be alone. 

He supposes he’ll make do. Even though being on the balcony is after all just an excuse to listen to Soonyoung talk about a terrible recurring dream or ramble about a cool piece of choreography he came up with in studio. 

Most of the last two years, though, out here they have shared easy quiet space. Some people you can be quiet around and it feels like a good conversation. All you have to do is hold their hand, or loop an arm through theirs. And it’s like asking them, how was your day? Mine was fine. I’m happy you’re here at the end of it. 

It’s like writing. With some people, simply existing near them is a form of writing. Until that’s not enough anymore. Until you know it’s coming to an end.

Behind them the party glows on. It’s Soonyoung’s playlist. Club music, the kind he always plays too loudly in the shower. Muffled now through the glass balcony door. 

“Fog,” Soonyoung points out. He has Wonwoo’s cardigan on. He’s swimming in fabric, hugging it to his stomach like it’s a safety blanket. He looks funny. It’s May. He must be hot in all that cotton. “Think it’s from the ocean?”

In front of them the campus town streets are veiled in mist. The night has a ghostly air to it. It feels like Wonwoo and Soonyoung are the last two people at the end of the world.

“Must be,” Wonwoo says. 

“Things are going to change a lot, huh.”

Soonyoung’s voice has softened. When he states the obvious in that particular tone of his it has an odd capacity to really hurt. He gets sentimental when he’s thinking too hard. Or maybe he’s sleepy-drunk already.

Wonwoo tries to imagine not knowing what part of which song has been stuck in Soonyoung’s head the whole day. Not emailing Soonyoung a draft of something before the embarrassment can come rushing in. 

He can hear Soonyoung’s laugh from the last time he sent him something finished, which was almost a year and a half ago. Funny and open-mouthed, sympathetic to the nervous pacing around the kitchen. Even though they both knew, of course, that as soon as Soonyoung read the words, Wonwoo would be comforted in a way that felt honest and very Soonyoung. 

Wonwoo, this is, like, published author level. Wonwoo, I’m serious, don’t laugh at me, I’m serious, this is good. You’re so good. 

“They were always going to change, I think,” is what Wonwoo settles on. 

Immediately it feels wrong. Too diplomatic. Dishonest. 

“I think some things in your life help you grow,” Soonyoung says, “and that’s good. But then, eventually, you outgrow them.”

There’s something cold in Wonwoo’s stomach. He wonders what Soonyoung is talking about. If it’s a person, if it’s maybe him. It might be. Soonyoung tends to think in definites. 

I could never outgrow you, Wonwoo doesn’t say. 

  
  
  
  


A week before classes ended, on the night bus with his cheek resting on Wonwoo’s shoulder, Soonyoung said he’d been trying to write Wonwoo a goodbye letter. 

Wonwoo laughed at him for a good few seconds before realizing that he was being serious. It was a bit of a jolt. Soonyoung said much weirder stuff all the time. But it was almost guilt-inducing when Soonyoung lifted his head, cheek creased pink from being pressed against Wonwoo’s shitty College of Engineering sweatshirt, and burst into a kind of forceful conviction. 

“I’m not kidding!”

“Okay, okay,” Wonwoo said, startled. “I understand that. But why? You don’t usually say things that way. You know?”

“I just think it’s a nice gesture because you love writing so much. But it’s not going so well.”

“I think…” 

“You think a goodbye letter’s too sentimental or something?” 

When he received no response Soonyoung raised an eyebrow, swaying along to the trundle of the bus. His hair was, for once, pitch black. 

Funny that it would end like this. Black hair. Throughout college Soonyoung had many favorite things. Most of all, hair colors. He said his number one favorite was when he had red hair, but also he loved looking at pictures of the silver. Can’t forget the blue, either!

The blue was really persistent. Wonwoo had slices of turquoise under his fingernails for days after he helped Soonyoung with the dye sometime in junior year. He’d somehow forgotten to wear gloves, so in the following week he bled blue everywhere he went. Down the bathroom mirror when he absentmindedly traced a word into the condensation. Onto the shower tiles when he looked down while chasing the end of a sentence in his head and noticed a ribbon of pale teal winding down the drain. Once, he bit his nails to the quick before scribbling something absently on a sheaf of looseleaf and when he stopped to reread what he’d written he noticed smeared droplets of watery turquoise, diluted with each successive line. 

Wonwoo never finished that poem. In fact he hadn’t finished a poem in almost ten months. His laptop was a ghost town except for Xcode and Terminal, but those didn’t count anyways. He knew what Soonyoung meant about wanting to write a letter and not being able to. He’d been wanting to write something to Soonyoung for so, so long.

“What are you thinking?”

The bus ground to a halt. Wonwoo leaned forward with the motion, carried with the inertia. He couldn’t figure out what he should say. 

Soonyoung tracked his face, still waiting for him to come back with something real smart, something disparaging, something sweet. Anything. The rectangle of the night in the window behind Soonyoung cast purple shadows on his nose and chin. The moon was just out of sight.

“This is our stop,” Wonwoo reminded him softly instead of giving him a good answer.

It was chilly outside. April usually got like this, lost its warmth as soon as the sun set. 

It was Friday. Wonwoo needed to call his mother. Lately he kept forgetting. Lately he always felt like he was being a terrible person, even if it was on accident. Every moment felt like a lost opportunity, except when he was next to Soonyoung.

Soonyoung was in an old band T-shirt, walking in a funny way and swinging his arms like he was pretending to be drunk. Impervious to the cold as always. He got too hot on the stuffy night bus if he wore layers. Usually he complained loudly about how sweaty he was until Wonwoo threatened to dump his Hydroflask on his head. 

Wonwoo himself tended to err on the side of coldbloodedness. Which was funny, because sometimes at night in the living room when he watched Soonyoung trying not to fall asleep in front of whatever shitty reality TV show they were watching, he felt compelled to push his palm against his own throat and feel the heat of his own jumpy pulse. 

It was always there. Sometimes it just needed a little bit of pressure to be felt.

Wonwoo thought about Soonyoung’s announcement about a goodbye letter. He couldn’t remember Soonyoung ever actually writing something for fun. During late lamplit nights in the library, while Wonwoo worked on his class projects or tried to write, Soonyoung usually watched Youtube on his phone or borrowed one of Wonwoo’s notebooks to doodle in the margins. He liked to stick around just for the sake of sticking around, the quiet punctured only when he leaned over to look at Wonwoo’s laptop, tried to read an in-progress poem or laughed at a funny code comment. 

If it was the first thing, Wonwoo would cringe away and try to hide his screen. If it was the second, Wonwoo would let himself be laughed at.

“I think it’s okay not to give me a goodbye something,” Wonwoo said eventually when they were in front of their building. He stopped and patted his pockets for his keys. “You never liked to write anyways. Or say goodbye.”

“I guess so.”

He found the keys, then looked over at Soonyoung and found Soonyoung was looking over at him. The moonlight had snuck half a halo of silver into Soonyoung’s dark hair. A patch of dried sweat shone sticky on his forehead, a remnant from late-night practice.

Wonwoo didn’t tell him, It’s not like you to give up on things. 

  
  
  
  


On the balcony instead of asking Soonyoung what he meant by the outgrowing thing, Wonwoo says, “You hadn’t looked too happy about the job offer.”

Soonyoung tries to laugh it off and offers him a shrug.

“I saw your face,” Wonwoo continues. It’s true. Back in their living room a week ago when he’d announced that he would, in fact, be employed after graduation working with back-end dev at a much-lusted over local startup, Jihoon had given him a grin and a slap on the back. Junhui whooped and said he should’ve gotten champagne instead of peach New Amsterdam. 

But Soonyoung had just stared at him from the space on the floor where the futon had been before they’d sold it. Eyebrows slightly quizzical, mouth narrowing into a pout that would’ve been cute in any other context but in the moment only made Wonwoo’s stomach plummet.

Now Soonyoung looks at him head-on as he usually does, arms still wrapped around his own skinny frame.

“I just want you to be happy,” he says finally.

“I will be.”

“You hate your major.”

“It’s a useful major. It’s a good job.”

“Useful or good doesn’t mean you’ll feel happy.”

“It’s not about that,” Wonwoo says, suddenly feeling a little irritated. “It’s not always about being happy, or doing what you want. You’re really lucky because you found something you love and you’re willing to overlook the bad parts of it and you’re good at it. I love writing, but I’m not very good at it. You see the problem.”

Instead of doing his slight pouty thing again, Soonyoung laughs low and shakes his head. He seems to glow in the moonlight, a little bit ethereal. Somewhat above reality, or beyond it. How is he supposed to understand any of Wonwoo’s shit?

  
  
  
  
  


When he met Soonyoung, Wonwoo was a Comp Lit major. He owned marked-up copies of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and Alice Munro’s collected works and told anyone who asked him that after college, he was going to go into publishing, or maybe editing, or maybe even an MFA program. He applied to a lot of creative writing workshops. He got rejected from all of them. 

When he went home the winter of sophomore year it was a week after he was turned down from the last one he ever applied to. And it was a week after Junhui invited him to their university’s departmental dance showcase. 

At the showcase Wonwoo saw Soonyoung for the first time, really saw him, and felt something like: So this is what being good is. So this is what true talent can feel like. Like brushing against the moon. Like feeling weightless, one-eighth of the prerequisite gravity, almost floating. No effort. 

Now, of course, he can see the effort. He knows all about it. 

But back then, inside of him feelings had been building and building, and this was just another one to add to the incessant pressure. At home over break, he gave up. Gave into the prodding that he’d been undergoing for the last year and a half from his parents. He switched into CS, started self-studying Python, and it was all well and fine. 

Because although he didn’t love it, he could be good at it. 

Wonwoo could tell from the beginning. How much Soonyoung loved to dance, loved it beyond all measure or limit of rationality. 

Soonyoung is still unafraid. Even now, when all Wonwoo can consider are the practicals of his near future. How Soonyoung will have to take on some year-to-year contract at a contemporary company, or become a choreographer for a community theater, or, or, or what?

Or it doesn’t seem to matter. Or all that matters to Soonyoung is the effort, bleeding heels and blisters and bandaged toes and shadows under his eyes for weeks in the run-up to a showcase. Soonyoung loves it simply for the sake of loving it. Maybe that’s what makes him unafraid of the future.

  
  
  
  


“You’re not bad at writing,” Soonyoung says on the balcony. “You’re not.”

“I don’t know.”

“Why do you think that?”

“I don’t know,” Wonwoo repeats. “Did you know you’re the only person who’s ever read my writing?”

Soonyoung’s expression doesn’t change, but he tips his head to the side like he’s studying a timid feral cat. 

“Really?”

“Besides all those faculty members,” Wonwoo says. “From the workshops. Who rejected me.”

Soonyoung starts to say something, then stops. It’s not like him to hesitate.

“What,” Wonwoo says, hearing his own voice low and tense, a stranger’s voice.

“Why do you think you trust me that much?”

“What kind of a question is that,” Wonwoo says immediately.

At the same time, his mind is beginning to spin. For some reason he starts to think of all the looseleaf cluttering his drawers. All the things he’s started and never finished, all the feelings that he can never fully capture. But now, tonight, on the balcony, he has to keep talking. If he doesn’t say it now he never will.

“Of course I trust you. I think— I think you’re the person whose opinion matters most to me. I think— well.”

And he stops to take a breath, because, uncharacteristically, he’s speaking before he’s fully thinking, words that don’t make much sense, stream of consciousness, embarrassingly honest.

“Soonyoung, I think you’re the person who matters the most to me. I—”

Soonyoung’s face is suddenly almost defensive. A hard sheen in his eyes that he gets during performances when he needs a shield.

“I mean it,” is all Wonwoo’s able to say, his voice a little too raw for ten at night on the balcony, but Soonyoung is standing in the moonlight and tomorrow Wonwoo will be gone into the far distance like a spaceship. 

“Why didn’t you say something to me earlier,” Soonyoung says, voice small. “Like, _months_ earlier, Wonwoo. This is our last day.”

“I hadn’t known.” There’s something hot and tight in his throat. “I hadn’t known how much I needed to say it.”

“That’s okay.” Soonyoung takes a deep breath. “At least you said it.”

“I’m sorry. I wish— I’m sorry. I never know how to say it. I never say it right.”

  
  
  
  


The problem with writing is you can never say exactly what you want. No one can. It can’t be taught. It can’t be learned. Not really. You read things that other people write, and you think, Holy shit, and then you try it yourself and you realize all over again that you will never, ever be as good.

He tried to explain it to Soonyoung once, sometime in junior year in the library while agonizing over a stymying Word doc. 

Soonyoung tipped the screen down and made an analogy over Wonwoo’s quiet protests. 

“So you mean it’s like you go to a restaurant and you order your favorite pizza, and you memorize all of its ingredients. But when you go home and try to make it yourself it always tastes different, because the restaurant has a secret ingredient that you can’t figure out.”

“Right.”

Soonyoung tipped the screen the rest of the way down. The laptop’s fan whirred to life. 

Wonwoo took his glasses off and wiped them on his shirt, sighing. When he put his glasses back on Soonyoung was leaning very close, like he was about to share a great secret. Wonwoo couldn’t remember if he’d saved the doc or not, but all of a sudden, it didn’t really matter.

“Maybe it only tastes wrong because you’re the one tasting it,” Soonyoung said. “Maybe if you took it to the restaurant and made the chef try it, the chef would say, Oh my god, this is genius, what am I doing wrong? I should try and get better. I should find a different secret ingredient.”

“Oh,” Wonwoo said, furrowing his brow.

“What I’m saying is, maybe, like, you know? Maybe never knowing how to make the perfect pizza is the whole point.”

Wonwoo thought to himself then that Soonyoung would make a pretty good writer.

  
  
  


The apartment that waits behind their balcony has become hard to face, especially down to the wire. Junhui sold all of their bed frames through mysterious means. The four of them have been sleeping out in the living room the last few days on blankets, shoulder-to-shoulder like one big week-long sleepover. Wonwoo, used to late nights gaming or working away at coding challenges, has been staring up at their popcorn ceiling for hours and hours every night thinking of everything that they have sold, or given away, or let go of. 

The cactus-shaped LED lights Junhui simply _had_ to buy from the dollar store last year but decided would seem too tacky to his fellow actors at the MFA program he’s headed to. Jihoon’s houseplants, which had been a nefarious gift from Seungkwan last semester that backfired because Jihoon is giving them right back to him. 

All of Wonwoo’s superfluous books over the years. A copy of Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook that he’d given to Mingyu in sophomore year in a gesture of growing up. Wonwoo’s second copy of Macbeth, the Folger Edition, which he’d found in the drawer of Soonyoung’s bedside table with a single post-it note stuck in it with a doodle of an unidentifiable feral creature. Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto, which Wonwoo will give to Soonyoung at the very last minute before leaving the apartment for good.

Wonwoo has been sandwiched between Soonyoung and Jihoon, who’s a late sleeper like him and is usually on his phone until dawn. Soonyoung, on the other hand, falls asleep deceptively fast. Despite all his natural body heat he likes to curl into Wonwoo like some sort of long-limbed koala. 

Wonwoo has been watching Soonyoung sleep and he has been imagining taking up a job at the campus bookstore where he used to work sophomore year. He has been imagining writing in all of his free time, writing poems about Soonyoung until he can get the words right. Until he feels like he doesn’t have to get the words right. He has been imagining what it must be like to be as brave as Soonyoung.

“You don’t always need to say it right,” Soonyoung says, balcony-honest despite the regret. He is very good at that. Staying in the present, not getting lost in the swirling eddies of what could have been, or might have been, if only. “You just need to say it.”

He looks so small in Wonwoo’s cardigan. Nothing like an adult ready to enter the world. These past few weeks he’s been waiting to hear back from dance companies, and the way he looks now is the way Wonwoo imagines he might momentarily feel after those auditions. The kind of fear that he is normally so skilled at overcoming. 

“But you know me,” Wonwoo says gently. “You know what I’m like. I need to say it right or I say nothing at all.”

Soonyoung scoffs suddenly and shakes his head. Just like that the fear in his body has dissipated.

“I don’t have the answers, Wonwoo. I hope you know that. If I had the answers I’d beam them right into your goddamn brain as soon as I got them. I hope you know that. Don’t you?”

“Of course I do.”

“And I didn’t mean you,” Soonyoung says. “When I talked about outgrowing things.”

He turns to lean against the balcony railing, staring up at space, his dark eyes focused on some faraway place with great certainty. His arms rest on the rail, propping him up above the rest of the world. 

“I just meant being afraid. I feel like I used to be afraid a lot about what was going to happen to me. How far I’d be able to take the dancing thing. Before, it almost felt like the fear was keeping me going. But I think I don’t need that anymore.”

  
  
  
  


After sophomore year, he and Soonyoung moved into the new apartment early for summer classes and lived alone together for a few months. 

It took time, at least on Wonwoo’s part, but they started trusting each other, then making fun of each other, then finding a kind of peace in each other. Like, the week after moving in, Soonyoung set the smoke alarms off three times because he kept forgetting he had things on the stove while doing stretches in the living room, and Wonwoo was tall enough to flap at the smoke alarm with a wet towel without having to get a stool. 

Like, soon afterward Soonyoung took this really enthused interest in what Wonwoo liked and did and loved to talk about. He even borrowed Wonwoo’s copy of Kitchen. Of course he never ended up reading it all the way through, but Wonwoo did find him asleep on the futon three times over the course of the year, the cover with the swirling tulip-shaped flowers nestled on top his chest like a small paperback safety blanket, his face peaceful and still in the moonlight coming in from the balcony.

The last time Wonwoo tried to write a poem was at the very end of that year. 

He’d been sitting at his desk staring into the white void of his laptop, something unbearable building in him, like a final giving-up. He stood, at the end of his wits, and stretched. Then he cranked the window open and closed his eyes against the moonlight, the cold breeze. He took deep breaths for so long that he forgot where he was until Soonyoung knocked.

“It’s open,” Wonwoo said.

“I wanted to ask if you wanted a drink, Junhui’s making these weird cocktails that actually taste really good—” 

Soonyoung poked his head further into the room and immediately wrinkled his nose at its state in general.

“Man, seriously?” 

Before Wonwoo could even put up a half-hearted defense, Soonyoung was inside the room gathering up old chips packets and empty Coke bottles. Aside from the big monitor, which Wonwoo supposedly used for coding and writing and definitely certainly not for gaming, the room was more of just a space to exist in. Most of the time Wonwoo was sprawled out in the living room futon anyways, with his laptop or a book or a snack, talking to Junhui or Jihoon or deciding which video might send Soonyoung on a very tangential rant about a niche topic of choice.

“A year and you still haven’t given up living like this,” Soonyoung said, fond despite his pretense of dismay, unknowing that a year later, Wonwoo would still be living the exact same way. “What the fuck are you gonna do without me?”

Wonwoo returned to his view out the window. Which was just a brick wall. 

Better than his cursor, blinking away, both perplexed and taunting. 

“I guess I’ll have to change. But that’s so far away.”

Soonyoung stuffed everything into an old CVS plastic bag lying on the floor and made a noise of amazement, laughing. “Look! Your room looks so much bigger now! Funny how that works.”

He was right. It looked like a real bedroom, with a visible floor and everything.

“Thanks.”

“You kind of look upset,” Soonyoung noted.

“I’m trying to— well, I’m trying to write.”

“Oh.”

Soonyoung looked over at the desk. The lights in the room were all off except a purple LED strip over the desk and the monitor itself, blinding and overbright. 

He reached over and clicked the light switch on. Wonwoo made a noise of protest and he laughed and clicked it off again.

“No wonder your eyes keep getting worse.”

In the darkness, caught in the computer screen glow and a wedge of moonlight from the window, the line of Soonyoung’s jaw looked delicate and precise. He was wearing his beanie and a muscle tee and sweats, and a trickle of sweat, tinged from his blue hair dye, made a path down the side of his neck. He must have just come back from practice. He often overextended his hours, and had done so enough times in the last three years that he’d become the only dance major who had the master key to the studio practice rooms.

When Wonwoo didn’t say anything, Soonyoung sat down at the desk. He swiveled round and round in the chair one, two, three times, finally coming to a stop in front of the monitor, where Wonwoo’s cursor was still blinking innocently.

Wonwoo felt what was not exactly possessiveness, but something very close. Something like fear, like that time a few months ago when Soonyoung almost stayed over at Mingyu’s for the night. 

Wonwoo remembered it as clear as any morning: Junhui tugging him out of the frat house, getting all the way across the street with his heart pounding weirdly on his tongue. Then, thankfully, hearing Soonyoung call after them. Wait! Never mind, I think I’m tired, I’m just gonna go home with you guys.

It was that, the kind of feeling he had when he was walking away from Soonyoung. The kind where he was too afraid to say anything. For what? For a fear of being seen, for a fear of things being made definite before he was all the way ready?

It was what he felt when writing. When Soonyoung read his writing. 

But Wonwoo let him in the end. Because Soonyoung was careful and patient when it really mattered.

“When it’s hard,” Soonyoung read out loud, leaning too close to the screen, “to find a star in the darkness…”

Wonwoo screwed his eyes shut.

“It’s a poem,” Soonyoung said with wonder.

“Right.” 

Wonwoo waited for a few long seconds for any sort of reaction. He heard a thump. He opened his eyes and turned to find that Soonyoung was no longer at the desk but had now flopped stomach-first onto the bed, tongue poking out from between his teeth as he started to doodle something in pen on a stolen notebook from the desk.

“When you’re ready,” Soonyoung said absently, “let’s go out and join the party.”

Wonwoo watched him for a few minutes, his smile growing, slow and helpless. Something that had been perched over his shoulder took to the air. He breathed deeply and sat back down at his desk. He sent his computer to sleep and copied Soonyoung, procured a loose piece of paper and a pencil. 

Then he remembered that Soonyoung was right behind him, and if he looked up from his drawing he might see all the evidence and entrails of Wonwoo’s heart. All the messy things. The not-right things. The scared things.

It began to feel too important to let go of. Wonwoo kept the page in a desk drawer, folded into fourths. Every time he opened the drawer, he thought of Soonyoung.

  
  
  


Wonwoo joins Soonyoung and leans over the balcony railing. They stare up at the constant moon, the distant dance of the Milky Way. 

Wonwoo takes deep breaths. The folded page is in his hoodie pocket. He’s been carrying it around the whole night, and the night before, and the night before that, trying to find a way to give it to Soonyoung. It’s still unfinished.

“I didn’t know you used to feel like that,” Wonwoo says. “Scared, I mean.”

“We all do, sometimes, I guess. This shit is hard.” Soonyoung bumps his shoulder with an elbow. “You’re not special.”

He means it as the exact kind of comfort that Wonwoo needs. Wonwoo nods a few times before he comes up with the words.

“Yeah. I know that you’re right. About my job and my major.”

“What are you gonna do about it?”

Wonwoo side-eyes him. “That’s such an easy question for you to ask.”

Soonyoung dips his head down and laughs, his cheek squishing against his hand where it rests on the railing. Then he stops abruptly.

“Tomorrow,” he says, low. “You and Jihoon are moving into the new place tomorrow.”

“Yeah.” Jihoon has a full-time offer as a sound designer at a gaming company near Wonwoo’s job. It makes sense. They keep similar hours, they exist at similar volumes, they’re comfortable together. Junhui’s moving out a week after, when their lease ends. Soonyoung’s planning on couchsurfing with their other friends until he hears back from his auditions.

“I saw all the boxes. There’s a lot.”

“Seokmin’s gonna come up and help us drive it over.”

“Oh, that’s good.” 

Soonyoung has this weird tension in his body. Wonwoo recognizes it without thinking about it. Soonyoung’s about to blurt something a little messy and revealing.

“Can I keep this?”

“Keep what?”

Soonyoung straightens up and gestures at himself. It takes Wonwoo a while to understand that Soonyoung means the cardigan. Wonwoo’s cardigan. 

“Of course,” he says. “Of course you can keep it, Soonyoung.”

Soonyoung’s eyes are shining. With tears, Wonwoo realizes. He looks away from Wonwoo. 

“It came really fast. Today. Faster than I expected.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t say something before,” Soonyoung says.

“Me too.”

They stand there in silence under the moon for a few seconds. 

Wonwoo has been trying to write this poem for a long time because he has been trying to say goodbye to Soonyoung from the very first day he saw him onstage. He had instantly known that there was no way their two paths would stay exactly the same. 

But maybe this isn’t as fatalistic as he’s been imagining it.

It’s taken a very long time to learn that letting things go isn’t the same thing as giving up on them.

“Someday I’ll look for a job that lets me do what I love and I’ll find you and we’ll live together again,” Wonwoo promises, “but before that, I’m going to leave my cardigan with you, and Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto even though I know you won’t ever read it, and this, too.”

He takes the page out of his pocket.

He unfolds it, spreads it flat against the pane of the balcony railing. His sparse pencil scribbles look like magical silver under the moon.

“When it’s hard to find a star in the darkness,” Soonyoung reads slowly, his voice coming alive with recognition, his silhouette drawing close.

“It isn’t done yet.”

“Hey, hey, it’s okay. One time I read that there’s this kind of Japanese poetry where you take turns writing lines. We can finish it together, Wonwoo. This can be my goodbye something to you. I have a pencil.” 

He does, in his sweatpant pocket.

“Of course you do,” Wonwoo says, affectionate beyond all measure of logic.

He takes the pencil like it’s a lifeline. He puts it down on the balcony railing and watches it roll gently across the paper before coming to a stop in the middle of his writing. Soonyoung leans near, excited, all of him narrowing to a bright point like a star.

“What do you think it’s about?”

“Guess.”

Soonyoung stares up at Wonwoo. He smiles the widest of his smiles, his eyes glittering. His hand moves on the balcony rail to cover Wonwoo’s where it rests on the page.

“The poem’s about me. Isn’t it?”

The fog is clearing. The night bus is on its everlasting route, steady and slow, glowing in the moonlight. 

“I think all my poems are,” Wonwoo admits. 

“Gross,” Soonyoung says, sounding like he is trying his best not to cry.

“Hey, Soonyoung,” Wonwoo whispers.

“Yeah?”

He flips his own hand palm-up, intertwines their fingers as tight as he possibly can. Soonyoung is as warm and sweaty as ever. Wonwoo is so thankful for it, for the fact that he can feel his pulse against Soonyoung’s like feet stomping on a stage. 

They look up, up above their balcony, up above their apartment. Up above the little world they are letting go of together. 

“Isn’t the moon bright tonight?”

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> this is largely indebted to prom by sza
> 
> thank u to kai for being my favorite 96zist and for helping me w these boys, kit for holding my hand, and lily for general snwu thoughts. and thank u to you for reading <333
> 
> find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/sunsburst) or [cc](https://curiouscat.me/sunsburst)


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